groupSPARK is the first Hosted Exchange messaging and collaboration provider to provide this important tool to their partners.

Windows SharePoint templates are out-of-the-box customized web pages that address the needs and requirements of specific business processes and sets of tasks. They allow for the easy customization of SharePoint services to any business situation for SMBs though SharePoint can be used in organizations of any size.

Even though Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 is a powerful standalone tool, application templates can be plugged in to help customize for specific situations such as:

The Competitive Analysis Site – The Competitive Analysis Site application template helps individuals and teams organize competitive information. The site provides useful document templates helping users perform useful competitive analysis techniques. Links to industry, company and product news can also be included making the site the central location for all industry and competitive news and information.

The Employee Activities Site – The Employee Activities Site application template helps manage the creation and attendance of events for employees. Users can submit event profiles and create event calendar items while other employees use the site to sign up as well as track their full activities list.

The Employee Self-Service Benefits Site – The Employee Self-Service Benefits application template provides a location to inform employees about available benefits as well as enabling them to enroll for each benefit.

The Sports League Site – The Sports League application template helps an intra-company league administrator manage a sports league. The site tracks team information, players, captains and scheduled team activities (including off-field activities). Team members can enter in game results and perform analysis at a team, game or individual player level. The site also enables discussions between league members through a League Discussion board.

In response to some recent suggestions from our Partners, we have begun to institute a Partner Notification System, which will provide our partners updated information on the health of our network. The first phase in implementing this system will be to expose our new Status page, located outside of our network, that shows the current condition for each of the services we run. This Status page should be available to you by the middle of the month, so keep an eye out for more information.

Outlook 2007 is our focus this month. We wanted to give you a few selling points and educate you on some of the cool new functionality you and your users will see with this release.

Advanced searching capabilities – The new Instant Search tool allows users to not only conduct keyword searches of their Outlook 2007 messages but also within e-mail attachments.

Centralized communication management – Users can now read and manage Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and blogs right from within Outlook 2007. This allows users to organize and manage more of the information they use on a daily basis from one central location.

Less junk mail and improved phishing protection - To help protect users from divulging personal information to a threatening Web site, Outlook 2007 has an improved junk e-mail filter and has added new features that disable links and warn users about threatening content within an e-mail message.

Integration with SharePoint Services 3.0- Users can connect and access SharePoint Services 3.0 documents, calendars, contacts, tasks, and other information through Outlook 2007, giving them a central place to manage information.

Just about everyone in the world has to pay for Outlook 2007 - except for your users - giving you a chance to offer a very compelling reason to use Hosted Exchange mailboxes. Right of the bat, you are offering them a savings of hundreds or thousands of dollars! As a cost conscious SMB, this is very attractive. Take advantage of this in your marketing pitch.

Technically, this isn’t just a promotion for February. Free Outlook has been a perk of partnering with groupSPARK from the beginning. Offering anything for free is going to make people pay attention to what you are saying. When you say you will give away software that would normally cost them around $100, this should really make them take notice.

We’ve been working hard on improving our BlackBerry Enterprise Server Infrastructure. Our upgrades have been significant and will make our BlackBerry service even more robust. We wanted to share some of what we’ve done with you:

• Upgraded Blackberry Enterprise Server Infrastructure by adding two additional servers
• The plan is to have one BES server for each Shared Exchange server, and a set of BES servers to handle just the dedicated servers
• We’ve seen, through our testing and analysis that restricting the number of users on a Blackberry server to approx 250, will drastically improve performance and reliability.

We’ve got plans to attend a lot of events this year.

• ISPCon (spring and fall)
• HostingCon
• The Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference
• The Hosting Transformation Summit

We’ll also be attending a variety of other shows with Microsoft. We’ll make sure and keep you up to date with our event schedule so if you’re attending a show we will be exhibiting at you’ll be able to stop by and chat.

Today more than 85% of all electronic mail traffic on the Internet is unwanted, malicious or offensive. SMBs are under siege from a variety of increasingly sophisticated attacks from hackers, spammers, and phishers. Being a small business doesn’t afford “security through obscurity.”

groupSPARK’s Postini solution blocks spam, viruses, and email attacks, and provides sophisticated message management and policy enforcement capabilities.